‘WORLD FIRST’ DOUBLE MACHINE ORDER BY UNICUT PRECISION FROM MACH 2008 SHOW STAND

The first international order for the world’s fastest 32 mm capacity CNC sliding head auto was placed on Citizen Machinery UK by Unicut Precision of Welwyn Garden City during the MACH 2008 exhibition at the NEC.

The order worth some £220,000, for two A32-VII machines was placed by the two joint managing directors of Unicut Precision, Charles Kenny and Jason Nicholson, and brings the total number of Citizen machines installed at the precision subcontractor’s18,000 ft2 machine shop to 25. Commenting on the order against the pre-production machine making its world debut on the Citizen Machinery UK stand at MACH 2008, Mr Kenny maintained: “The A32 specification will give us an improvement of at least 40 per cent in productivity on the specific contracts we have in mind.”

Mr Nicholson pointed out: “The potential return on the investment made the decision to purchase a low risk. From our previous experiences, we know Citizen will not let us down when the production machines are installed and with this level of productivity improvement, we are looking at the new machines almost performing the work of three existing machines.”

Unicut Precision recently increased its premises at Welwyn Garden City by 40 per cent as a reaction to a sales growth of 12 per cent in 2007. In the new bay, two new Citizen K16 machines were installed in January and sited alongside two further K16 machines ordered at the EMO exhibition in Hannover during September 2007.

Commenting on the credit squeeze Mr Nicholson said: “This has not influenced our expansion plans – what has, is the movement of Euro against sterling which has already drawn significant enquires and orders for some very sophisticated components. The Citizen A32’s will free up capacity on our high specification Citizen M32 machines which will then be used for new and more complex work on difficult materials involving lots of driven tool milling.”

Both Citizen A32-Vll sliding head autos that were ordered are full specification machines with live tooling, Cool Blaster 2,000 PSI high pressure coolant systems, 3m bar feed and Absolent mist extraction. Citizen Machinery (UK) was not aware of the pending purchase because the two directors were keen to compare performance specifications and productivity capability against other machines at the show.

The heavy duty Citizen A32-VII has a 32 mm bar capacity by 320 mm machining length and is powered by 7.5 kW main and 3.7 kW sub spindle. Up to 27 tools can be carried on the Unicut Precision machines as the directors have taken advantage of the option packages with driven tools powered by 1 kW motors. The rapid traverse rate is 45 m/min more than double the previous 32 mm capacity Citizen machines and combined with the Citizen Streamline software running on Mitsubishi control hardware, overlapped cycles can be performed, smoother movements are ensured and any idle times considerably shortened – all factors Unicut are keen to exploit for increased productivity.